Ex-Paramount Chair Shari Redstone Privately Worried That Trump Could Sue Over CBS Interview With ‘Drowsy’ Joe Biden and Bring Embarrassing Internal Documents to Light

Former Paramount chairwoman Shari Redstone pushed to settle President Donald Trump’s lawsuit against CBS News in part because she feared that Trump’s lawyers might seize on the network’s editing of an interview with a “drowsy” Joe Biden and inflict further reputational damage, according to a report from the New York Times.

Trump sued CBS over its editing of a different interview with former vice president Kamala Harris. The network’s refusal to settle that suit, Redstone suggested in a series of interviews with the Times, could have prompted Trump’s attorneys to launch such a similar case targeting the Biden interview. Redstone worried that the discovery process in that case could “do more damage to CBS News’s reputation than any settlement would” by unearthing embarrassing “raw footage and internal communications,” the Times reported.

Scott Pelley of 60 Minutes interviewed Biden in October 2023, around the same time as the former president’s sit-down with Special Counsel Robert Hur, who later described Biden as a “sympathetic, well-meaning old man with a poor memory.”

Pelley described Biden differently. He attributed any physical or mental problems Biden exhibited during the interview to “a rough week.”

“Biden will be 81 next month,” Pelley said, “and he has said that when he’s tired his lifelong stutter can creep back in, but he wedged us into his schedule to express his commitment to Israel after the massacre of more than a thousand civilians eight days ago.” Redstone told the Times that CBS staffers privately described Biden as “drowsy” during the interview and noted that he “had to be prodded to answer.”

Mainstream media outlets were quick to dismiss Trump’s Harris interview lawsuit—which alleged that CBS’s 60 Minutes deceptively edited footage to make Harris appear more coherent and boost her presidential campaign—as unserious and doomed to fail. Redstone seemed to disagree.

“This case was never as black-and-white as people assumed,” she told the Times.

Last month, Paramount agreed to pay $16 million to settle the lawsuit. Trump, meanwhile, has referenced an additional “side deal” that he says will see CBS air millions of dollars in free conservative advertising and public service announcements under CBS’s new parent company, Skydance. Paramount’s board denied the deal; Skydance has said it was not involved in settlement negotiations but has not rejected reports of the deal outright.

“I hope it isn’t true,” Redstone told the Times.

Redstone also took aim at CBS’s anti-Israel bias in her interviews with the outlet. She conceded that CBS “needed more balance,” an apparent reference to a January 60 Minutes segment, which Redstone criticized, that relied on sources connected to the anti-Semitic Council on American-Islamic Relations to condemn Israel’s war on Hamas. The group’s executive director praised Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attacks.

“Part of me thought, maybe Trump could accomplish what I never got done,” she said of efforts to fix the network’s partisan slant.

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